JenniferSoft starts to voyage into the next frontier vigorously

JenniferSoft is a special guest in the current issue of MacroSoftware. JenniferSoft is the only Korean developing company which attended at 2007 JavaOne Conference in May and at that time I heard it is going to open U.S office in San Francisco. I revisited JenniferSoft in this month to listen to its recent news and more specific plans. Let’s listen to their story and desire to become a global company with technological prowess.

Written by reporter, Hee-young, Jung – flytgr@imaso.co.kr

JenniferSoft starts to voyage into the next frontier vigorously

JenniferSoft is located in Ga-san digital cluster in Seoul. Generally, high partitions and a line of desks are the symbol of working environment of developing company. However, I little bit hesitated to enter JenniferSoft’s office when I arrived there because of many big trees in front of the office entrance. If I couldn’t see the familiar faces, I might pass the office. JenniferSoft’s employees were working in the office by sitting in a circle without partitions.

I heard that such desk arrangement idea is from CEO, Lee Won-young’s business mind. He god rid of partitions in order to encourage communication among employees. He even encourages employees to chat during the working hours because he believes such communication plays a key role to connect each member’s heart and come to understanding.

CEO Won Young, Lee’s eccentric experience

Won Young, Lee is so called “the first generation java developer” who has applied Java technology in enterprise environment since mid-1990s. While people had an argument whether Java can be applied in enterprise or not, he has already started working in Java Framework project of LG EDS (Now, the company name is changed into LG CNS). At that time, there was not enough data about Java and even definition about framework was not oviously established. However he has stared to post his valuable data and articles from his own experiences on the company website. As time goes by, the data is accumulated continuously and community member also significantly increased up to 400. Since then, he moved to IBM Korea and opened on-line community to share the data consistently with java engineers except for confidential data of LG EDS.

At that time, it was not easy to open and manage an on-line community like today. However, he bought several thousand dollars of computer and paid 200-300 dollars every month for IDC (Internet Data Center) server hosting services to manage his community, Java Service Net (www.javaservice.net). Of course, he didn’t get any financial profit. Many people evaluate Won Young, Lee and his community highly in terms of spreading important information to developers using Java. However, most people couldn’t understand his thought and regard him as an eccentric person because usual people don’t want to share and provides own data without any benefits. However, Won Young, Lee can improve his ability through this valuable experience. As he has managed Java community and taken in charge of performance determination task in IBM, he could communicate with many enterprise developers and get many information. Then, finally he detected weak points and limits of foreign APM (Application Performance Management) solutions.

Those facts were so attractive as a business item to him. However, it is traditionally said that eight or nine out of ten developers fail in their business. Nevertheless, he handed in his resignation to his company and started to develop performance solution called Jennifer. After that, he established a solution developing company, JenniferSoft with a sales manager. Now, JenniferSoft with only 9 employees defeated global foreign vendors within two-and-a-half years and occupies over 70% of Korean APM market. However, he has annother bigger ambition. He established a Japanese branch office in September and supplied ‘Jennifer’ to Fujitsu. Hitachi and Japanese one of largest solution distributor, Marubeni solution will also start to sell Jennifer. More surprisingly, another branch office was also established in the U.S recently.

The power of JenniferSoft is experience with technology

Then, who developed Jennifer? At first, Mr. Lee has drawn up an overall outline of Jennifer and director, Sung Jo, Kim gave shape to that plan. Mr. Kim has taken part in pilot project in LG CNS for 2 years and has many experiences with performance test, troubleshooting and system optimization. After establishing JenniferSoft, Mr. Kim successfully implemented bite code instrumentation just within 6 months. Mr. Kim and Lee could find out problems and get useful developing ideas based on their experiences from after using foreign performance solutions. In this process, Jennifer’s representative features, X-View graph (Scatter chart of response time) and class byte code handling program are developed. They also applied CRUD matrix which has not been applied in AMP solution. The CRUD Matrix is a technique to identify the tables in a database which are used in any user interaction with a web site. However, they think this function is significantly important when doing troubleshooting. Two Jennifer developers put emphasis on a developer perspective and developed Jennifer. That’s way many enterprise developers and engineers recommend and prefer Jennifer. Of course, some developers reluctant to use Jennifer at first due to its unfamiliarity. But once they take Jennifer on trial, they usually call again to request Jennifer.

Technology is common language.

CEO, Lee always says that “Technology is common language. And Korean developers have outstanding ability. If Korean vendors and developers have confidence and superior technology they can extend their business abroad.” He already has shown his possibility and now, tries to prove it. He has dreamed to make JenniferSoft into global company and prepared to support multilingual services with English, French, Chinese, and Japanese.

I think his dream, ambition and efforts have borne fruitful results. When Jennifer was exhibited at JavaOne Conference, many consultants from global companies such as Accenture, IBM, Oracle and Sun expressed great interests about Jennifer. Now, members of JenniferSoft are aggressively and actively jumping into the global market. A plan of R&D center in India can be an example as well.

I heard that his ultimate purpose is to move JenniferSoft’s headquarter to Silicon Valley. I sincerely hope that he realizes his dream and JenniferSoft will be a global IT company in the worldwide market.